


Gallop Apace

by chewysugar



Category: Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare
Genre: F/M, Implied Sexual Content, POV First Person, Sexual Frustration, Wedding Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 15:52:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13791021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chewysugar/pseuds/chewysugar
Summary: When the sun goes down, he'll be here. He will come to her and make her his at last.





	Gallop Apace

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by something I heard Our Lord and Savior, Jessica Chastain, talk about on a podcast.
> 
> She apparently auditioned for Julliard by playing Juliet as a sexually frustrated fifteen year old. 
> 
> Which is brilliant. 
> 
> Because Jessica Chastain is brilliant.

Summer heat filled my bedroom. It stretched across the floor like a languid whore; it rose to the ceiling, climbing up the walls and leering at me from every corner. It insisted on its presence, pressing against my skin, stifling me like the hand of some foul predator of the night.  
  
All other thoughts had long since abandoned my mind. I stared out the balcony, across the gardens with their deathly white crocuses and bleeding violets. The sun sank slowly in a cloudless sky; shadows spread over Verona, reaching like fingers towards my family home. My face flushed from the light of that sun, so slow in its descent.  
  
I wanted to stab at it; to take it in my hands and drown it in the ocean; to cover everything with cloaking steam. Anything to conceal. Anything to cover the streets of the city I despised. Only under some kind of cloak could the one thing I wanted above all come to me.  
  
His face swam in my mind. The memory of his soft lips against mine made heat prickle along my mouth. I remembered his arms; his lean, strong body.

My feet, bare in the unforgiving heat, curled into the rug beneath where I stood.  
  
This very balcony. We’d had moments that had lasted, to me at least, forever. He’d taken me away—from the garden, from Verona...from my family. All he’d used at first were words; but words in my household were always such cruel things: sharp and taunting, like daggers meant to subdue. When _he_ used words it was as if he were singing—plucking something from somewhere distant and meaningful and true.  
  
I’d never heard anyone speak so kindly and vulnerably, let alone a man. Now he’s my husband— _my husband_ ; and I am his wife. But that damn sun won’t let us be together. It isn’t fair, that Nature should plot against us along with our families.  
  
My Romeo has to come to me under cover of night. And this of all days it seems as if the sun is sinking at its leisure. The way it dipped below the distant hills almost made it look as if it was spreading a shadowed grin over the land. It was mocking me, mocking my impatience and my need to be in my husband’s arms.  
  
He hadn’t held me that night in the garden. The point below my balcony had been too low down for him to reach me. Our lips had touched, soft and blushing and wet and warm. But I hadn’t felt his touch.  
  
My eyes narrowed at the bloody gold light of the evening. “Faster,” I hissed. “Do it faster.”  
  
The sun continued to stare in triumph.  
  
I left my vigil on the slowly sinking sun. Romeo filled my mind: the curl of his hair; his smile like a winter’s morning; the deep timber of his voice. I shivered despite the unforgiving heat. Suddenly I felt all too exposed in my night shift. But this was my bedroom; there was nothing to see me but that sun.  
  
I lay on my bed, eyes half opened.  
  
It would be dark soon, I told myself. Eternal daylight was impossible. Night would take the world in her obsidian folds, and then my Romeo would be here and...  
  
Again I shivered.  
  
He didn’t have the strength of men like Tybalt. But he was so lean, like some great wild cat. Only he was gentle, the kind of thing that would crawl onto your lap to be stroked.  
  
The scent of flowers filled my nose, carried by the gentle evening breeze.  
  
He would be here soon.  
  
Then I would feel his arms around me. I would feel his body against mine. He would be bared to me and I to him. I wasn’t as prudish as my mother or Nurse wished me to be; cousins better than Tybalt had told me all about the act. I’d seen drawings not meant to be seen by girls of my tender age; read bawdy poetry and snuck verses from lustful writers. Other girls even older than me, with their blushes and scandalized faces, shrieked and fainted at such things.  
  
I found people like that so boring. God created us; God doesn’t make mistakes; therefore, shouldn’t the act of sex be something to enjoy?  
  
I stretched like a cat on the bed. My hair fanned out behind me. The warmth of the evening seemed to permeate my shift, and then sink into my skin. With it came a rush of blood that spread throughout me. The images in my mind of Romeo crystallized from idle thought to fantasy.  
  
He would be bare before me and he would be beautiful; not like those pitiful castrated statues of the gods or prophets, but a real man: hard and unyielding.  
  
My tongue wet the dryness of my lips.  
  
Soon.  
  
He would take me in his arms, lay me in this very bed...I squirmed on the covers, my face half buried in my own hair.  
  
Darkness would finally set over Verona. We would have to be in the dark here in my room, or else risk discovery. But there would be a moon, and even if there wasn’t, I still had touch; I still had my other senses.  
  
“Romeo...”  
  
He was so beautiful, I wouldn’t even need light, or even instruction.  
  
Yes.  
  
We would both know how to move, how to touch.  
  
My fingers curled into the sheets. I saw him in my mind, imagined the feel of him against my skin; around my fingers; inside my body.  
  
Yes...  
  
He would take me, again and again. I would be his completely, no longer just Juliet, but his Juliet. He would be everything: gentle, coarse, loving, passionate. Nothing would matter with him—not blood or the shedding of it. Only us; only we two joined as one.  
  
I arched my neck backwards; my free hand trailed between my breasts to my navel. He would linger there, spent, head against my body. His breath would be warm, better than the heat of the accursed sun. And there would be many hours left to us—so, so many hours in the night. Morning wouldn’t matter because nothing would.  
  
“Romeo...” His name spilled from my lips like a prayer.  
  
Come morning—what did I care for morning? All we had was the night. Anything after that was meaningless. He could kill me and I would be happy only to have finally felt him as a woman should feel a man. If only the world would do something with him once left behind without me; worship him; hang him from the heavens like the constellation of mighty Orion. Starlight was so pithy compared to my Romeo.  
  
My mind turned to frenzy. I saw him, felt him, heard him. A sting of pain overwhelmed me as I bit into my lip. I writhed on the bed like a serpent. My fingers tore at both sheet and the front of my shift. The heat within my unleashed like the spreading of some almighty, carnal blossom.  
  
For one moment I felt weightless. Then I opened my eyes.  
  
It was darker in the room now. Not so dark that what is envisioned would be waiting in the garden; but dark enough that I got to my feet and looked back out over Verona.  
  
Twilight. Cicadas and crickets chirped their songs of sexual longing into the coming night. There was nothing left of the sun now but a glow behind the hills that painted the sky in hues of gold and emerald and purple.  
  
Beads of sweat lined my forehead. My hair was a mess that would have made my mother scream had she seen it. As my heart slowed to a normal beat, I smiled in victory at the sunset. Night was inching its way across the sky, draping the world in its embrace of starlight and silence. The fires would light, peppering the streets with phantasm orbs of fire. And then...  
  
“Romeo,” I whispered into the twilight. “Hurry...”

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think!


End file.
